Books of The Times; A V.S. Pritchett Collection of Characters

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: October 6, 1989

Like everything written by V. S. Pritchett, the tales in this latest collection bristle with wonderfully eccentric characters, people who are willfully, even proudly, themselves. There's a distinguished writer named Pearson - seemingly a portrait of the author as an aging artist - who has carefully filled his study with props (paper clips, pipe cleaners, scissors, paste) to postpone his ''entering the wilderness, the wilderness of vocabulary'' (''The Image Trade''). There's Rhoda, a middle-aged woman with wild, witchy looking hair, who likes to astonish her relatives by talking about the impotence of her numerous lovers (''Things''). And there's Lionel, a dispassionate hairdresser, who regards his customers as ''top-knots,'' devoid of bodies and independent lives (''A Careless Widow'').

Most of these people, we quickly learn, are lonely, isolated souls, cut off by age, illness, bad luck or simply their own habits of privacy and decorum. Lionel, for instance, says he resents his neighbor Mrs. Morris's intrusions on his life - her importunate visits, her requests for decorating advice, her curiosity about his daily routines. After she leaves a whisky glass stain on his sofa - an event that he says requires the reupholstering of the entire couch - he starts putting her off when she telephones or stops by.

''She was ordinary life,'' he observes, ''and ordinary life always went too far.'' When she announces her intention to remarry and move away, however, Lionel feels abandoned, as though everyone else were moving ahead with private plans, and he had been left behind. ''Another garrulous fragment of ordinary life was leaving him, going about its business,'' he thinks. ''He was afloat in space, and below him he began to feel the cold air of an empty flat.''

Paula, the heroine of ''A Change of Policy,'' similarly feels as though she has been living in ''limbo.'' Having been let go from her job at a magazine, she finds she has become ''a curiosity,'' someone whose ''friends had outlived their influence,'' someone without money or tangible prospects. After considerable debate, she accepts an old acquaintance's offer of romance - his wife lies in a hospital bed in a coma - but she has no sooner begun to rediscover the possibilities of communion when the man abruptly dies.

In ''A Trip to the Seaside,'' a widower named George decides, a bit reluctantly, to pay a call on his former secretary, Louisa. He isn't overly enthusiastic about the visit, but having decided to find a new wife, he figures Louisa will probably suffice. While waiting to pop the question, he notices, rather disparagingly, that the furniture in the room is ''the kind that is bought at a discount,'' that the place was ''cold and smelled of polish.'' He is then shocked to discover that Louisa actually lives elsewhere, that she has married the wealthy owner of a hotel - a hotel quite superior to the place where he is staying himself.

The fluctuation in feelings that George experiences moment to moment - as self-satisfied expectancy gives way to patronizing irritation to jealousy and disappointment - is minutely traced by Mr. Pritchett, who seems to have complete omniscience (and perfect pitch) when it comes to documenting the subtle ebb and flow of his characters' emotions. He shows us the perversities of passion - its refusal to conform to tidy class boundaries or convenient configurations, and he also shows us the necessity of illusions: the need of his characters to hide their vulnerability behind cranky displays of temperament, to create their own fictions about their lives.

Perhaps because they have settled deep into middle age (even joined the ranks of the elderly), many of the people in ''A Careless Widow and Other Stories'' seek solace in reminiscence, using memory to transform the past, to make it buttress some idea they now cherish of themselves. The old writer in ''The Image Trade,'' who says he now fascinates literary archeologists, recalls his ''early slim-subaltern-on-the-Somme-waiting-to-go-over-the-top period,'' his Popular Front period, his ''jersey-wearing, all-the-world's-a-coal mine period.'' The middle-aged professor in ''Cocky Olly'' reminisces, as she drives some of her students down to London, about her childhood in the country, her initiation - through the son of her parents' neighbors - into a wonderful and now vanished bohemian world of tea parties and parlor games. And Rhoda in ''Things'' revisits the haunts of her youth ''for old times' sake,'' reliving the what-ifs of long dead romances.

Several of the stories in this volume - including ''Things'' and ''A Change of Policy'' - have a nervous, contrived air to them, as though Mr. Pritchett felt compelled to stuff the narratives with needless incident and melodrama. Though nicely written, such tales fail to move the reader, for they feel like laboriously constructed fictions, rather than startling illuminations of an individual life. Still, the strongest stories in ''A Careless Widow'' (most notably the title story and ''A Trip to the Seaside'') can stand up alongside Mr. Pritchett's finest earlier works - which is high praise indeed for any work of fiction. Advance Publicationsd(Random House)